One of my favorite Project Runway designers, Jay McCarroll, was on Celebrity Fit Club this season, which I only knew because they show clips of it on The Soup. The Project Rungay boys interviewed him about the experience. A few quotes, which I’ll put behind a jump because there’s a bunch of diet talk.

Why he went on the show:

[I]t was just about the life experience. When else is someone going to hand me money to and pay me to lose weight? And It’s driving a lot of people to my site who had never been to my site before and they get to see my stuff. Fuck it, I want to have life experiences. I had a paid vacation in L.A. where all I had to do was work out and get every meal delivered to my front door for 3 months. I mean, who wouldn’t want to do that?

I love when celebrities articulate the realities of their weight loss. Because for a lot of these celebs (especially ones who have babies and then are on the cover of magazines a week and a half later all, “How She Dropped The Baby Weight!”) weight loss becomes their entire job. A chef makes them food, and all they have to do all day is work out. Jay McCarroll doesn’t usually have that life, but a lot of celebrities do. So his outside-looking-in perspective is interesting to me.

On being back in the real world:

Now it’s just a matter of finding a balance. Because I’m back in a world that has bread.I know I’m never going to be 150 pounds and I’m never going to have a six-pack and I needed to get over that.

On making his weight a public issue:

Oh, yeah. People have been very positive about it. That’s the only thing that worries me. You’re a public figure and you lose weight on television and everyone’s happy for you and then you gain the weight back and it’s a whole other story.I don’t want that to happen. I also know reality, like today I had a six-hour meeting about my new fabric line and I didn’t have time to like, sit down and have grilled salmon and then head off to the gym. I was occupied with other things. Now it’s a matter of working it deeply into my schedule. I have to.

I think celebrities who lose weight on TV kind of make the proverbial deal with the devil. Because you have an audience, and people rooting you on, and then suddenly that audience feels ownership in your results. And so then you’re like Carnie Wilson or Kirstie Alley, constantly having to publicly humble yourself and beg forgiveness for gaining the weight back.

And finally, on the fashion world:

You don’t feel beautiful, but you feel drawn to beautiful things and you want to make beautiful things and have beautiful things all around you so people won’t notice that you’re not beautiful. That’s where I ended up. I wanted to be in a place where I felt like I could add beauty to the world because I felt like I had no beauty to offer the world myself. But then getting to that track in fashion and getting to that place where what is considered beautiful is completely repulsive to me, i.e., Kelly Cutrone and her world, there’s nothing beautiful about that. It isn’t real. Fashion week and all that stuff, when you’re a fat teenager, that’s what you aspire toward.

But when you’re an adjusted 30 year old, that stuff doesn’t look beautiful anymore. And that’s just how I feel about it. It’s just a circus of dysfunctional fucking people who have low self esteem and body image issues. Fashion is full of people who drink coffee and smoke cigarettes for a meal.

My dream is still for Jay to go out and do a plus-sized line. Because come on, how fabulous would that be?

Posted by mo pie

Filed under: Carnie Wilson, Celebrities, Diet Talk Warning, Fashion, Kirstie Alley, Project Runway, TV, Weight Loss